Pablo Reinoso

This book is the first important monograph dedicated to the work of Pablo Reinoso, a Franco-Argentinian artist and designer, a curious and largely self-taught jack of all trades. Technically a sculptor, but actually an artist through and through, Pablo Reinoso has been exploring multifarious artistic avenues from an early age. Part-French, through his mother, he left his native Argentina in 1978 and settled in Paris, where he worked on his art. He produces his works in series - Articulations (1970-80), Water Landscapes (1981-86), The Discovery of America (1986-89), Breathing Sculptures (1995-2002) - which he chops up and rummages through as he explores new worlds and different materials, translating the permanent work in progress which is his way of thinking. An increasing maturity is evident in Ashes to Ashes (2002), a work in which he twists and splits wooden boards in an attempt to rid them of their function. Continuing in the same vein, but having in the meantime held important positions as an artistic director and designer in large companies, Reinoso began a new series in 2004 highlighting an icon of industrial design, the Thonet chair. He then turned his attention to the seemingly anonymous public benches found in all cultures throughout the world - objects that for this very reason are timeless and beyond fashion. The results are his so-called Spaghetti Benches (begun in 2006), which have multiplied and found their place in the most unlikely corners. In his very latest series, Scribbling Benches (started in 2009), Reinoso no longer takes an anonymous bench, nor an iconic chair, as his point of departure, but a steel girder. The work plays on the unexpectedness of a solid, heavy object, a key structural component in architecture, that is made to twist like a piece of wire and turn into a bench suggesting airy, transparent, contemplative spaces.
About the Author: Michel Serres, a philosopher, epistemologist, and professor of philosophy and history of science at the Sorbonne, is also know for his teaching at Stanford University. A member of the Académie française, he is one of today's greatest French intellectuals. Gérard Wajcman is a writer and psychoanalyst, besides being a lecturer in the department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris 8, as well as a member of the Ècole de la Cause Freudienne. He is an avid art lover, and his studies and books mainly focus on deciphering the image, and the omnipotence of 'visual culture' in our century. Henri-François Debailleux, is a journalist and art critic for Libération and Journal des arts; he teaches at the ICART (Ècole du Management de la culture et du marché de l'art), and along with numerous catalogue introductions, he has also organized several exhibitions himself.